Jake Adam York
| birth_place = West Palm Beach, Florida | death_date = December | death_place = Denver, Colorado | resting_place = | occupation = Poet, professor, editor | nationality = American | education = | alma_mater = BA, Auburn University, MA, Ph.D. Cornell University | period = | genre = poetry | subject = | movement = | notableworks = | spouse = Sarah Skeen | influences = Seamus Heaney, A.R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Emily Dickinson, R.T. Smith | influenced = | awards = Elixir Prize in Poetry (2005), Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards (2007), Colorado Book Award (2008), National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (2012} | signature = | signature_alt = | website = | portaldisp = }} Jake Adam York (August 10, 1972 - December 16, 2012) was an award-winning American poet. Life Youth York was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1972 to David and Linda York, who worked respectively as a steelworker and history teacher.Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey, Southern Spaces, Emory University, accessed Dec. 17, 2012. Shortly after York's birth he and his parents moved back to Alabama, where five generations of York's family had lived.POETRY WIRE: REMEMBERING JAKE ADAM YORK, 1972-2012 BY DAVID BIESPIEL, The Rumpus, Dec. 17, 2012. Accessed Dec. 17, 2012. York spent the rest of his youth in Gadsden, Alabama, where he lived in a rural house and shared a bedroom with his brother, Joe.Claire Martin, "Jake Adam York, poet who chronicled Civil Rights movement, dies at 40," Denver Post, December 18, 2012. York was a big fan of rap music, including LL Cool J and Run DMC, and covered his bedroom in posters of his favorite rappers. As his brother Joe later said, Jake was a "15-year-old kid in northeast Alabama in 1988, where white boys didn't listen to rap. But he did, and he loved it. Listening to those guys really tapped into his love of playing with language. He went to college to become an architect, but after two quarters at Auburn — and he was an A student — he became more interested in the architecture that holds our lives together." York graduated from Southside High School in Gadsden in 1990 and that year started at Auburn University, where he eventually earned a B.A. in English. He then received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University.Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey, Southern Spaces, Emory University, accessed Dec. 17, 2012. Career and editing York worked as an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where he was an editor for Copper Nickel, a nationally recognized student literary journal he also helped found. In the Spring of 2011, York was the Richard B. Thomas Visiting professor of creative writing at Kenyon College. During the 2011-2012 academic year, he was a visiting faculty scholar at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. In addition, York was a founding editor of storySouth and a contributing editor of Shenandoah.http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry/york_ja/index.htm He also founded the online journal Thicket, which focused on Alabama literature. In 2005, when fiction writer Brad Vice was accused of plagiarism in his short story collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, York took the lead in defending the author."Taking It Personal: The Politics of Advocacy" by Jake Adam York, storySouth, Dec. 5, 2005. Vice was accused of plagiarizing part of a story from the 1934 book Stars Fell on Alabama by Carl Carmer. However, York noted that Vice had allowed the short story and the similar section from Carmer's original book to be published side by side in York's literary journal Thicket. To York, this action by Vice "implicitly acknowledges the relationship (and) allows the evidence to be made public." York added that doing this allowed the readers to enter the "intertextual space in which (Vice) has worked" and that what Vice was doing with his story was allusion, not plagiarism. York also stated that, according to his own analysis of Vice's story and Carmer's source material, Vice did not break copyright law.Fell In Alabama: Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night by Jake Adam York. storySouth. Accessed November 6, 2005. York's view was proven correct when Vice's collection was republished 2 years later."THE STRANGE CASE OF BRAD VICE: In defense of a destroyed treasure" by Michelle Richmond, The Oxford American, Issue 55. York also wrote an introduction to this new edition of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train."Brad Vice Finds a New Publisher for His Controversial Story Collection," Poets and Writers, May 31, 2007, accessed Dec. 19, 2012. Poetry York's poetry appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The New Orleans Review, The Oxford American, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, and The Southern Review. His first book of poems, Murder Ballads, won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry. His sophomore book, A Murmuration of Starlings, won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry and was published through the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.http://www.coloradohumanities.org/content/2009-colorado-book-award-winners His 3rd book, Persons Unknown, was published in 2010 as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry by Southern Illinois University Press. Both books chronicled and eulogized the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. In 2009, York was the University of Mississippi's summer poet in residence.http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/mfa/SpiR/york.htm On February 14, 2010, York was awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize. Death York died on December 16, 2012,Best American Poetry blog (December 16, 2012)"Poet Jake Adam York, 40, has died" by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy website, Dec. 17, 2012. Accessed Dec. 17, 2012. from a sudden stroke.POETRY WIRE: REMEMBERING JAKE ADAM YORK, 1972-2012 BY DAVID BIESPIEL, The Rumpus, Dec. 17, 2012. Accessed Dec. 17, 2012. Writing York counts among his influences, Seamus Heaney, A.R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Emily Dickinson, and R.T. Smith"Interview with Featured Poet Jake Adam York," Town Creek Poetry, spring 2007, accessed Dec. 19, 2012. Terrain.org: "Context matters, but good poetry is not bound by it. Jake Adam York’s Murder Ballads — a collection of 35 poems in four parts, published by Elixir Press — is a book where context matters. But the finely crafted poems — what Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith rightly calls York’s “demanding poetic” — are not bound by that context."http://www.terrain.org/reviews/18/murder_ballads.htm Pulitzer-Prize winning author Natasha Trethewey described A Murmuration of Starlings as "a fierce, beautiful, necessary book. Fearless in their reckoning, these poems resurrect contested histories and show us that the pas t—with its troubled beauty, its erasures, and its violence —weighs upon us all . . . a murmuration so that we don't forget, so that no one disappears into history." The Rumpus: "York’s study into the Civil Rights Movement is not meant to be an indictment of the American consciousness; rather, he strives to present the stories of these persons unknown so that his reader cannot help but reflect on this murderous chapter in American history. He never sinks into oblique facts, but he does not forget them, either. He never ignores the simple truth that he is writing poetry, and crafts a collection that is moving and substantial. Persons Unknown is a necessary addition to the oeuvre of civil rights literature and the conversation it (still) invokes."http://therumpus.net/2011/08/one-of-us-is-already-gone/ Recognition Murder Ballads won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry A Murmuration of Starlings ''won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry ''Persons Unknown was an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. York was also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in poetry."Poet Jake Adam York, 40, has died" by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy website, Dec. 17, 2012. Accessed Dec. 17, 2012. Publications Poetry * [http://www.jakeadamyork.com/murder/ Murder Ballads]. Denver, CO: Elixir Press, 2005. * [http://www.jakeadamyork.com/murmur/ A Murmuration of Starlings]. Carbondale, IL: Crab Orchard Review / Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. * Persons Unknown. Carbondale, IL: Crab Orchard Review / Southern Illinois Press, 2010. *''Abide''. Carbondale, IL: Crab Orchard Review / Southern Illinois Press, 2014. Non-fiction * The Architecture of Address: The monument and public speech in American poetry. New York: Routledge, 2005. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Jake Adam York, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 25, 2015. See also *List of U.S. poets References Notes External links ;Poems *"Self-Portrait in the Town Where I Was Born" at Verse Daily *[http://www.greensbororeview.org/spring-2002/interferometry.html 'Interferometry' at Greensboro Review] *[http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue01/Templates/jake_adam_york.html 'Legba Says' in Octopus] *Jake Adam York 1972-2012 at the Poetry Foundation *Two Poems at Shampoo Poetry *2 poems at Diagram: "'Elegy for James Knox," "Signal" *Three Poems at Cambell Corner *Three Poems at Terrain.org *Three Poems in Typo *[http://www.diodepoetry.com/v1n1/content/york_ja.html Four poems at Diode] *[http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry/york_ja/index.htm Four poems at Blackbird] *[http://realpoetik.blogspot.com/2007/06/jake-adam-york.html Selections from A Map of the County at RealPoetik] *[http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-5/Jake-Adam-York.html Seven poems at H_NGM_N] ;Prose *"Recovery: Learning the Music of History" at Terrain.org *"The Marrow of the Bone of Contention" at storySouth, an Arts and Letters Daily 2003 article of note. *Jake Adam York, "Anniversary", Southern Spaces, 15 April 2010. http://southernspaces.org/2010/anniversary *Jake Adam York, "A Field Guide to Northeast Alabama" Southern Spaces, 7 March 2008. http://southernspaces.org/2008/field-guide-northeast-alabama ;Audio / video *Jake Adam York at YouTube *Jake Adam York, "In the Queen City: A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library" Southern Spaces, 1 April 2008. http://southernspaces.org/2008/queen-city-reading-gadsden-public-library ;Books *Jake Adam York at Amazon.com ;About *Jake Adam York Official website. *[http://www.review.gsu.edu/york_interview.html interview with New South] *[http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n1/features/york_ja_100105/index.htm interview with Blackbird] *interview with Kate Greenstreet *[http://dislocatemagazine.blogspot.com/2006/11/interview-project-4-jake-adam-york.html interview with Dislocate] Category:1972 births Category:American poets Category:Auburn University alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:University of Colorado Denver faculty Category:2012 deaths Category:People from West Palm Beach, Florida Category:Writers from Florida Category:Writers from Alabama Category:Deaths from stroke Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets